militants, supporters and sympathizers, and of organizing the work of propaganda necessary to obtain votes and thus jobs, enabling party officials to be maintained and retained on a long-term basis. This apparatus of mobilization, which distinguishes the party or the trade union both from the aristocratic club and from the intellectual group, depends at one and the same time on two things: first, on objective structures such as the bureaucracy of the organization properly speaking, the jobs it offers, with all the correlative profits, in itself or in the different branches of public administration, the traditions of recruitment, education and selection which characterize it, etc.; and second, on dispositions, whether this is a matter of loyalty to the party or of the incorporated principles of di-vision of the social world which ihe leaders, party officials or militants implement in their daily practice and in their properly political action.
The acquisition of a delegated capital obeys a very specific logic: investiture, the veritably magical act of institution by which the party officially consecrates the official candidate at an election and which marks the transmission of political capital, just as the medieval investiture solemnized the transfer of a fief or of a piece of landed property, can only be the counterpart of a long investment of time, work, dedication and devotion tt> the institution, it is no coincidence that churches, like political parties, so often appoint oblates to lead them.*1 The law which governs the exchanges between agents and institutions can be expressed in this way: the institution gives everything, starting with power over the institution, to those who have given everything to the institution, but this is because they were nothing outside the institution or without the institution and because they cannot deny the institution without purely and simply denying themselves by depriving themselves of everything that they have become through and for the institution to which they owe everything/’ In short, the institution invests those who have invested in the institution: investment consists not only in services rendered, which are frequently more rare and precious when they are more costly psychologically (such as all initiatory ‘ordeals'), or even in obedience to orders or in conformity to the demands of the institution, but also in psychological investments, which mean that exclusion, as a withdrawal of the capital of institutional authority, so often takes the form of financial failure, of bankruptcy, both social and psychological. (This is all the truer when, as in the case of excommunication and exclusion from the divine sacrifice, it is accompanied by ‘the strictest social boycott' which takes the form of
a refusal to have anything to do with the excluded person.)42 The person invested with a functional capital, equivalent to the ‘institutional grace' or the ‘functional charisma’ of the priest, may possess no other ‘qualification’ than that granted to him by the institution in the act of investiture. And it is still the institution which controls access to personal fame by controlling, for example, access to the most conspicuous positions (that of general secretary or spokesperson) or to the places of publicity (such as. today, television and press conferences) - though the person endowed with delegated capital can still obtain personal capital through a subtle strategy consisting of distancing himself from the institution as far as is compatible with still belonging to it and keeping the correlative advantages.
It follows that the elected member of a party apparatus depends at least as much on the apparatus as on his electors - whom he owes to the apparatus and whom he loses if he breaks away from the apparatus. It also follows that, as politics becomes more professionalized and parties more bureaucratic, the struggle for the political power of mobilization tends to become more and more a two-stage competition: the choice of those who will be able to enter the struggle for the conquest of the non-professionals depends on the outcome of the competition for power over the apparatus that takes place, within the apparatus, between professionals alone. What this means, in short, is that the struggle for the monopoly of the development and circulation of the principles of di-vision of the social world is more and more strictly reserved for professionals and for the large units of production and circulation, thus excluding de facto the small independent producers (starting with the ‘free intellectuals’).
Tur- Institution a i. i zation of Poutical Capital
